Wednesday, February 18, 2015

E. Ethelbert Miller - The Aldon Nielsen Project - A BOOK AS BIG AS HISTORY

Q.
C.L.R. James saw Richard Wright's Native
Sonas
not just a major literary achievement but also an epochal moment in
American cultural history. During your lifetime have you seen any
book by an African American author having a similar significance?
Are there any texts that can be viewed as "events' in
history?

James’s
long-standing friendships with Richard Wright and Paul Robeson are
evidence of his ability to sustain lasting and productive
relationships with people whose ideology ran counter to his own.
James and his wife were good friends to the Wrights and James was a
central figure in the group of intellectuals Wright was gathering for
a publishing project that fell apart due to lack of financial support
shortly before Wright’s departure for France.

During
the time I was studying with James there was one cultural phenomenon
in particular that James saw as similar to Native
Son
as a signal moment in American history, and that was the Roots
miniseries. Neither James nor I had much admiration for Alex Haley. I
had always been deeply suspicious of Haley’s “finishing” of The
Autobiography of Malcolm X,
and Haley’s many appearances on television and in print interviews
while working on Roots
had led me along with many others to believe he was undertaking a
project of history. My many suspicions about Haley were compounded by
the testimony and settlement around his borrowings from Harold
Courlander’s not very good novel. I always believed Haley’d
borrowed illegitimately from Margaret Walker’s Jubilee
and that she might have prevailed if she’d had a better lawyer.

The
problems with the book were if anything magnified by the television
series, but that didn’t particularly bother James. What was of
interest to him, and I think he was right about this, was parallel to
what he had seen with the publishing success of Native
Son.
Whatever the works’ failings, the fact was that as the Roots
miniseries unfolded, millions of Americans were avidly tuning in to
this story of Africans in the New World and their legacies for our
present.

There
may be other instances since then, but the one literary work I can
think of in immediate response to your question is Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.
I will always believe Song
of Solomon
to be the greater work, though I much admire Beloved,
and my considerations of the book’s reception will always be
affected by the open politicking for a PRIZE
for Morrison (which lobbying effort I don’t think she had anything
to do with). Still, Beloved
became canonical almost instantly, something to be enfolded by
syllabi everywhere. The book is even taught in high schools, though I
have to believe the teachers are either skipping over a couple of
passages or just don’t quite grasp what is being described therein.
It’s hard for me to think of a book since Steinbeck’s Grapes
of Wrath
that has had such a wide effect in American general culture. On a
list of books that would include Sinclair’s The
Jungle
and Salinger’s Catcher
in the Rye,
Beloved
rapidly became a touchstone. I know that James would have been
fascinated and moved by the reception of this book, which appeared
shortly before his death. James had always been an enthusiastic
supporter of Morrison. His late essay “Three Black Women Writers”
was about Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. I still
remember the day when several of us were in a café on Capitol Hill
following a talk James had given on his book Beyond
a Boundary.
I was having a conversation with the person next to me at the table
who happened to mention Sula.
James’s eyes lit up the way I had seen so many times, as he said,
“Did I hear someone mention Sula?
That is a remarkable book.” An entire generation since has come of
age reading Beloved,
a generation that has mostly not read or seen Roots.
(Though I note that the name of Kunta Kinte has lived on in the
culture, even among those who have never read of him.)

Another
book we might see as having had similar historical import is
President Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams
from My Father,
and I suspect we could make the case that a generation raised reading
Beloved
was in some ways a generation not only prepared to read Obama’s
book, but a generation ready to vote for America’s first Black
President. (And yes, you can ignore what Morrison had to say about
Bill Clinton in that regard.)